We entered winter with sixteen Shetland sheep, all ewes, and
six Dwarf Nigerian goats, all does. So far, we’ve been increasing our herd by
buying animals—the Real Doctor has done hours and hours of homework, carefully selecting
those animals with good genetics and good conformation.
It’s kind of like fantasy baseball, choosing
a squad that’s as good as possible, but fantasy is constrained by realities of
availability and cost.
We’ve also obtained
a few animals that weren’t exactly our first-round draft picks, but that were
very good deals, because the seller was moving or getting out of the sheep
biz.
This mode of herd growth suits me just fine, but the Real
Doctor assures me that there is another way.
Strange as it is to me as a microbiologist, the Real Doctor tells me
that you can both increase the number of animals and reap the benefits of genetic recombination by combining haploid
cells from two animals—but you need male animals to do this. I admit, I have had some reservations about
this way to grow a herd. Consultation
with textbooks has reassured me about the biological plausibility, but the male
animals themselves give me pause.
First, there’s some terminology: male goats are bucks, not billys. Goat people give you the hairy eyeball if you
call male goats billys. So, bucks. Bucks are weird. They have some behaviors that simply are not fit for polite society, impolite
society, or any human society. There is a medical term, hircismus, describing
“offensive odor of the axillae,” or foul body odor, and tellingly, the word is
derived from a Latin word for a he-goat (sorry, buck. I keep
forgetting). Bucks have an earned
reputation for single-minded lechery. And,
they butt. One of the contractors who
worked here related the story of a friend of his who wanted to see what butting
was like. So, he donned a football
helmet and challenged a buck. One bop,
and the contractor’s friend was k.o.’d.
Well, we don’t have just one buck, we now have two
bucks. There’s Guy Fawkes, the seasoned
pro, and Arion, the naïve yearling.
 |
| Guy (left) and Arion (right). |
Having just one buck is a problem—goats and sheep are herd animals, and
keeping one by itself makes it go crazy(er).
They do have their unmentionable behaviors, but if you don’t watch them,
you do don’t see them doing it.
They
smell, though not as bad as I had feared—every once in a while, there’s a
breeze that smells like an accident in a feta cheese factory, but that’s all.
They are lecherous, but fortunately my
resemblance to a female goat is so slight that they don’t try anything with
me.
And so far, the macho posturing has
been minimal—they’ve been polled, so between the two of them, they have maybe
six cm of horn.
They don’t butt each
other much at all.
They’re not all that
noisy; their call is an embarrassingly effete, quiet, apologetically squeaky
“mee-eh-eh-eh-eh.”
They are a bit dumber
than their sister-folk.
I can’t say I
like them as much as the does, but I guess I’m reconciled to them.
Then, there’s rams.
With a polled, fifteen-kilogram buck that comes up to your knees,
there’s not too much to be afraid of. However, rams are scary, and anyone who works
with rams knows that you have to watch your back when you’re with them, even
cute little Shetland rams. They lack the
bucks’ rich bouquet of personality quirks—everything seems to be about butting.
We now have two rams, a pair for the same reason we have two
bucks. We got them a week ago, much
sooner than we were planning on acquiring any rams. However, a friend had a ram with excellent
genes, but just didn’t get along with any of her other animals—so, as long as our
friend can use his services, he’s ours.
Also, our friend has a buddy who is shutting down her sheep operation,
and she had a really nice ram, and another ewe, going at a fire sale price, so
we picked up both of those animals too.
Rams, like any ruminants, need at least one companion. However, they also need to know their place
in the herd hierarchy, even if the herd is only two. So, at first, they spent most of their time
butting each other. We were advised to
keep them in a small pen rather than an open pasture, so they couldn’t gain too
much momentum before impact, so I built them a 5-by-8 pen and closed them
in. After that, I couldn’t watch; I don’t
like violence, and even though I knew it was their program and that they
weren’t just built for it, but they needed it, I found it disturbing enough to
turn my stomach. Going to bed at night,
it sounded like distant artillery—a steady, muffled “whhhump… … …whhhump…” that
would go on for a half hour, then pause, then resume. It continued in the morning.
After a couple of days, the rams seem to have sorted out the
general terms of their social contract (Glenfiddich is the boss, Pirate is the
underling; both have the scars of negotiation on their heads).
 |
| Glenfiddich (left) and Pirate (right) in their momentum-limiting pen. Blow up the picture to see the battle scars. |
There are still occasional collisions to iron
out the details of their relationship, and we’ve been advised to keep them
penned up for a week or more to make sure that everything is resolved.
It’s been a week, and for the last few days
their efforts have been less focused on damaging each other, and more
concentrated on damaging their pen.
They
have smashed the door of their pen three times, and I’ve spent a lot of time
and hardware reinforcing it.
Instead of
waking up to the noise of a distant artillery duel, I woke up this morning to
the sound of splintering wood.
This doesn’t endear them to me; I don’t appreciate my work
being trashed, and I don’t appreciate having to fix it in the cold and dark. It’s especially unnerving to do work on the
inside of the pen when the rams are pawing at the ground and looking at you as
if they’re wondering exactly which of your ribs they’d like to break on their
scarred foreheads. So, while I like the
ewes and does and most of the chooks, and I am even getting along well enough
with the boy goats—no, with the bucks—the
rams are still a problem for me. I hope
they calm down, and that we can at least achieve détente. And we should see lambs and kids ere too
long, and they are loveable.
